Guide How Elemental Defenses Work

Elemental defenses theory up until recently:
Defense skill points apply to negative elemental defenses

Fundamental understanding of Elemental defenses that still hold true:
Elemental defenses apply additively to elemental damages dealt by mobs. So if you have 0 defense, but a -50 thunder elemental weakness, and a mob deals 50 thunder damage you would take 100 damage in total from getting hit by that mob.

Contemporary understanding of elemental defenses:
1) elemental defenses are applied before spell modifiers. This makes elemental defenses simultaneously more and less dangerous. For instance, if you had -100 thunder defs and you got hit by a monster's thunder arrow storm, you wouldn't take -100 thunder damage every arrow, you would probably only take 30 extra damage per arrow assuming the spell modifier was 30%. This applies to high spell modifiers as well though, meaning high modifier spells like meteor could potentially hit you for extra thousands of elemental weakness damage.

2) Defense applies to elemental damage, but not elemental weaknesses.
Example:
Mob: 50 water damage
Spell: Meteor (800% spell modifier)

Player: 0 ele defs, 50% defense
(50*8*.5) = 200 (mob damage*spell modifier*player defense) = damage
Takes: 200 damage
Total damage: 200 damage

Player: -50 water ele def, 50% def
(50*8*.5) = 200
(50*8) = 400 (Elemental weakness*spell modifier) = damage
Takes: 200 damage + 400 damage ignoring defense
Total: 600 damage

Basically, elemental defenses are not affected by defense skill points. Elemental weakness damage acts like "true" damage.

3) Mob hits (like normal projectiles or mob melees) that trigger elemental weaknesses will ignore defense skill points

tldr:
Negative elemental defenses ignore defense skill points, dealing "true" damage.
Despite this, elemental defenses are still pretty much in the same boat, they don't really matter too much unless you have really bad elemental defenses. However, the more defense skill points you have and the lower your health, the more relevant elemental defenses are.

Big thanks to @mr bread, @iTechnically, and @Selvut283 as well as Atlas Inc. in general for doing most of the work on figuring this out.

 

ah yes knowledge

 

bump9char

 

Elemental defences somewhat matter








The world is ending

 

it take some big brain shit to
a) understand this
and b) somehow figure this out
ty Ren

 

Bump10char

(Everyone must know our new understanding of ele defs!)

 

e

 

Bump10char

 

Heck, let’s bump this, why not

 

Hey, it's not a necropost yet :D

 

yep it isn't